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TimeLMs: Diachronic Language Models from Twitter

Daniel Loureiro, Francesco Barbieri, Leonardo Neves, Luis Espinosa Anke, Jose Camacho-Collados
Event ACL 2022
Research Areas User Modeling & Personalization, Natural Language Processing

Abstract

Despite its importance, the time variable has been largely neglected in the NLP and language model literature. In this paper, we present TimeLMs, a set of language models specialized on diachronic Twitter data. We show that a continual learning strategy contributes to enhancing Twitter-based language models' capacity to deal with future and out-of-distribution tweets, while making them competitive with standardized and more monolithic benchmarks. We also perform a number of qualitative analyses showing how they cope with trends and peaks in activity involving specific named entities or concept drift.